Background Constant Contact Complete

Constant Contact have been from the marketing game since 1995. During that time they have managed to turn into one of the email tools in the world, boasting over 650,000 clients. Constant Contact Complete

What Makes them special is that they have added features over the years that none of their competitors sport, such as surveys an event management tool, and campaigns. All these add to the varied collection of alternatives as well as automations and recurring newsletters.

On top of these choices, they also boast a Marketplace with over 400 integrations that cater to even the most niche of merchandise and apps. Yet despite these flashy numbers and features, interest in Constant Contact appears to be on the decline, at least according to Google Trends. Enough reason for us to take a closer look at Constant Contact’s ins &amp; outs and check if it is still applicable in the 21st century.

If you are choosing an email Marketing tool for your business, you can do much worse compared to Constant Contact (which begins at $20 per month). If you want to test a few of the features out without committing, then the company provides a free trial. This review looks at the Email program, which supports up to 500 contacts. Were it not for some hiccups that were unexplained, Constant Contact might have been an easy pick for our choice.

How does Constant Contact pile up against the Contest for companies with 2,500 connections in its marketing database? It carries a top price tag. Email marketing tools have a limit on but Constant Contact does not.

Since our last appearance, Constant Contact has Email autoresponders beyond those triggered by sign-ups, such as birthdays and anniversaries. You can also send an email series to a set such as a day-by-day guide to getting started with follow-ups or your service to a event. This works by matching them up using autoresponders and copying your contacts into various folders. The image library now allows 2 GB of storage. Users may access stock photos that are paid and free directly through Constant Contact. Finally, you can now interact with support via Twitter. Constant Contact Complete

Customer Support

Constant Contact is Simple to Use and has lots Beginning with the information icons located next to choices and disciplines explaining what they are Knowledge Base articles, and trainers available. Constant Contact has a Task page that lists the status of different tasks, such as contacts that are uploaded, so that you understand what is going on in the background.

Phone support Isn’t 24/7 but the hours are Still pretty generous, moving from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. during the week, and 10 a.m. to 8 pm on weekends. Chat is available, along with the brokers will call you to ensure you have all the info you want.

Pricing and Features

Constant Contact offers a number of programs Depending on the size of your subscriber base. The cheapest plan is $20 a month for as many as 500 subscribers and $45 for up to 2,500. A plan prices $195 for $10,000 subscribers and $335 for 50,000. Price-wise, it is not too different from Campaigner. You can sign up for additional add-on providers, such as EventSpot ($20 per month for a single event; $25 for up to five events) for event registrations, and Survey ($10 per month) to conduct surveys (all of which can be included at no additional charge on the Email Plus program ). The fundamental account comes to keep images used from the campaigns with a Library. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Newsletter Archive ($5 a month) generates a widget that may be added to a website on which you can display links to around 100 mails. If you would like your clients to be able to see your messages that are older, this is a.

The free trial Provides you access to all These attributes for 60 days however you can just send up to 100 mails. The trial is a great way to get accustomed to the platform for a number of messages. Once you’re sure about the stage, upgrade to the paid version and get started blasting away. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which can be unusual in this area.

Campaigns

When you’re ready to create a newsletter, you May use the template to get started. The editing application allows you tweak pictures, text, and even colours. There is also a media library where you are able to save your personal assets, such as company logos and other images. Constant Contact Complete

Once you’re Happy with your newsletter, You can send it right away or schedule it for later (in 5-minute intervals, such as 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so on). We couldn’t locate a recurring program to send messages on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis the way Campaigner does, or to send messages based on the local time at the receiver’s location, as GetResponse can.

The company recently announced a new Attribute called Action Blocks, which enable marketers to include polls or RSVP cubes to regular emails. This permits recipients to respond to messages with one click without having to leave the email inbox and also visit a web page.

Tracking Efforts

You can monitor As Soon as You’ve sent a newsletter Its achievement using the Reports tab. The dashboard displays the fundamentals, such as unsubscribe requests, and opens, clickthroughs, bounces. A useful bar chart shows open rates and a graph compares performance over multiple campaigns. Users can also pick up to five emails to compare high speed results side by side. The report has a convenient Refresh button so that you may observe real-time outcomes. It is not like MailChimp in which you have to manually load the pages. When we opened emails and clicked on the links, they had been registered almost instantly.

The Resource Center offers links to Info about average clickthrough rates by industry. You may also look at relative metrics to figure out if your degree of involvement with your customers is improving or declining over the past 3 months. The mobile app is handy if you need to observe the effort performance from your mobile device.

Lists

There are several ways Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually sort addresses into a type, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT), import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other (CRM) tools.

After we used the form to manually put in an Address, we received an error message but it did not state what had gone wrong. We were prompted to hit on the last button to return and resolve the issue but we could not because the page had expired out of our browser (Firefox) cache. After a few attempts, the entire page crashed. This is an unusual experience, to say the least. Constant Contact has assured us its infrastructure has greatly improved since our initial test and this is not likely to occur again.

The file upload import, and CRM Migration alternatives, on the other hand, were easy to use and stable. We believe most people would end up using these choices. We monitored the upload progress under”Contacts: Activity” and was notified when the import was complete. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and other disposable addresses. It is too bad many services do not follow the example of GetResponse$15.00 at GetResponse, which filters out known disposable domains. Constant Contact instead flags contacts that are inclined so that the user can choose whether to remove or keep them to be transactional or other such email addresses.

Segments are based on that list you. If saving the contacts but it’s also quite simple to go back, choose and adjust the list. In the Contact Manager, we just clicked on the addresses we wanted to incorporate to another listing. A new feature enables users to choose a list for contacts to whenever they click on a link within an email to be added, the business said. This feature is available in most packages. It may be paired with an autoresponder so that, when a link is clicked by a contact, a email is delivered to them automatically. Constant Contact allows you assign tags to contacts, which can be helpful if you want to track things like the way they signed up, even if they are loyalty members, or whatever else you may want to track. Constant Contact Complete

Our only quibble with the Contact Manager is That it is a pain. After we glued our list and cut, we just dropped in email addresses. We didn’t have other areas, such as address or name. Update the fields and we needed to load each person record, to bring this. Because the pages were slow to load in our testing, this was not that simple. Since we could see the whole list in Contact Manager, then it would have been nice to be able to simply click on the lost area, enter, and just keep going straight down the page. So, lesson learned: Be certain to have each the applicable fields before uploading the titles populated.

Constant Contact also enables you to produce forms That customers can use to register for emails and newsletters. These forms can be hosted on your site or on Constant Contact’s servers. You can segment the users based on if they used the sign-up form or alternative methods, which may be useful. The company also recently announced a new sign-up form editor that’s designed to allow users to create inline forms that can be embedded onto a site in addition to pop-up forms that could be customized to show after a fixed amount of time or when a visitor tries to leave the website, the business said.

Constant Contact requires you to confirm that You have consent from your entire record! Since there’s no way to confirm you have permission from every individual receiving messages sent to that address you also can not use set addresses such as sales @ or marketing @ addresses or distribution lists. You can create autoresponders, listed under the Create button, to ship every time a user is added to a list. We used the templates to build a particular publication to new subscribers.

Drawbacks

Constant Contact generally feels like a Stage but its error messages were disconcerting. This apart, the tool is strong, and for businesses Constant Contact is a fantastic way to get started. We wish it provided flexibility in the scheduling of campaigns and production of autoresponders in particular. Constant Contact Complete

If you do not need these features, Then Constant Contact is a superb choice. Should you want just a little bit more flexibility in your marketing strategy, then have a look at email marketing Editors’ Choices Campaigner and MailChimp instead.

Automation

Because Constant Contact only offers seven Sorts of marketing automation functions doesn’t like to refer to itself as a marketing automation package that is traditional. Rather, Constant Contact likes to inform prospects that it’s a cross between email marketing and advertising automation or exactly what it requires”email automation.”

That is because, unlike other tools, such as Editors’ Choice marketing automation platforms Pardot and HubSpot, Constant Contact does not does not offer branching logic. It focuses on two triggers to begin automation campaigns. For example, you can start an automation workflow whenever someone joins a listing or accomplishes a landmark, such as a birthday or anniversary as a customer. You can not alter automationsbased on whether or not somebody opened an email, forwarded an email, or clicked on a link within the body of this email.

These attributes, which make marketing Automation platforms automatic, slightly more smart and, well, than email tools, make life easier for entrepreneurs and personalized for clients. In addition, Constant Contact doesn’t provide A/B testing (they do provide subject line A/B testing), no search marketing addition, and the limited workflows you can create do not offer you drag-and-drop builders, that can be pretty much standard nowadays. Should you need automation for interactions with customers Constant Contact is a automation system. However, if you would like advanced sequencing and flexible workflows that adapt to your clients’ specific activities Constant Contact is not strong enough to compete in the marketing automation area.

Wrap-up

As Constant Contact themselves reiterate through their site, they’re a tool for businesses. And, as such, it is well worth assessing them on these terms. As mentioned previously, they have enough of the basics covered to satisfy small companies, and then we’d recommend them highly, if it were as straightforward as that. Constant Contact Complete

The issue, nowadays, is that there are plenty of email Tools that offer even more than Constant Contact, and also for a whole lot less cash. This includes user experience, but also not only features. In fact, for the volume you pay with Constant Contact, you could end up using far more powerful tools such as ActiveCampaign and GetResponse.

They do pick up points For their adequate deliverability rates, integrations (particularly social websites integrations), also for enabling different access levels for different users. And with recent improvements to coverage and promotion automation, it does seem like they’re making an attempt to enhance the product. But their lack of innovative features which makes it difficult to recommend over others at their price point. Constant Contact Complete